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Hall or Chamber? That is the Question. The Use of Rooms in Post-Conquest Houses

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  11 April 2016

Anthony Quiney
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Extract

When the Society of Architectural Historians visited Little Wenham Hall in September 1998 Edward Martin’s conference notes presented it in the light of a relatively new interpretation of such lordly buildings. This interpretation generally rejects the old view that they are ‘upper halls’ on the grounds that they are instead chamber blocks that have lost the hall ranges on which they once depended. While this seemed to offer a plausible explanation of Little Wenham Hall, it was not entirely convincing (Fig. 1). As a matter of record the Society also visited both Framlingham Castle, which contains the ruins of a possibly similar domestic structure, again now thought to be a chamber block dependent on a lost hall range, and Colchester Castle, of which more below.

There has always been something curious, if not exotic, in that all-embracing category of post-Conquest stone domestic building known as the ‘upper hall’. It rose from the wastes of the Dark Ages like a shooting star to glitter briefly in the twelfth century only to fade away slowly a century or so later. The new explanation that its function was different from that of the hall and was moreover dependent on an open hall is therefore compelling: after all, open halls and dependent chamber blocks have a well-established pedigree.

Type
Research Article
Information
Architectural History , Volume 42 , 1999 , pp. 24 - 46
Copyright
Copyright © Society of Architectural Historians of Great Britain 1999

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References

Notes

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